Cavalry Man: The Killing Machine by Ed Gorman

Noah and David Ford were raised in the south but fought on opposite sides in the Civil War. After the war, Noah became a US Army Investigator while David moved to the Montana territory where he chased women and dealt in arms sales. David has an early generation Gatling gun that he has re-engineered to improve its performance considerably. He is promising 30 guns to the highest bidder.

David and his new toy haven’t escaped the attention of the US Army so Noah is dispatched with the hope that the blood connection will help sway David to deal with the Army and not just the highest bidder, of which David has representatives of four interested buyers.

Noah spies on a demonstration and is impressed so he decides to surprise David by dropping in after the audience has returned to town to work out their bids. But when Noah gets down to the barn that houses the gun, his world explodes in a shower of bullets that could only come from a Gatling gun. Wounded in his shoulder and after working up the strength, he crawls into the barn to find David’s throat slashed, lying in a lake of blood, and the gun gone.

Noah gets patched up and spends a day or two in the town hospital. He meets the local marshal and works out a cagey partnership to find out who killed David and then to find the gun. And he starts snooping around the prime spots for information like the saloon, livery, and barber shop.

MRB friend Charlie Stella made a pitch for Gorman on his blog not long ago and the Knuckmeister is usually right on target with his recommendations. Now my partner in the venture also took the bait and chose a Gorman book and didn’t like it. Must've been the choice of titles. Turns out The Killing Machine is part 1 of 3 about The Cavalry Man (assume that’s Noah Ford) and I kind of liked it. Some might say it resembles an old Agatha Christie novel where there are dozens of suspects, each with reason to be the killer, until the book's detective sorts it all out in a big reveal at the end (yeah, but this has a lot of shooting, too). The writing is as sparse as the trees on the far western prairie of Montana making the setting easy to picture while reading. I could see Noah as the grandfather of MRB fav Joe Pickett in his view of right and wrong or his strong and quasi-silent nature. If not Pickett, then maybe Walt Longmire. Either works. Gorman is a Spur Award winner for western fiction as well as Shamus and Anthony awards for his work, so he's got the chops. I’ll look for parts 2 and 3 of this series and get back to you. 

East Coast Don

The Day the Music Died by Ed Gorman

The Day the Music Died by Ed Gorman is the first in a 10-novel series about lawyer/investigator Sam McCain. Gorman is a very prolific author who has never been reviewed in this blog. I saw a recommendation for the 10^th book in the series from one of MRB’s favorite authors, Charlie Stella, who has never written anything or recommended any books that disappointed. I thought I’d jump in from the start of the series, but I was disappointed. It was not the specific book that Stella recommended, so his record is intact. The McCain character is interesting, but the story that surrounded him in The Day the Music Died was not very good. I didn’t find the characters (Judge Esme Anne Whitney, the police chief Cliffie Sykes, etc.) to be particularly believable, and I nearly stopped reading it at the 1/3 mark. But, I was curious about McCain and kept on. Of course, it’s a murder mystery and Gorman has an appealing understated quality to his writing style, but I won’t write any more about this book. I have a category called “airplane books” which is defined as something that would be entertaining enough for a cross country flight, but not one that is so spellbinding that it would prevent a nap, and it wouldn’t break your heart if you left it unfinished on the plane. This one does not quite rise to that level. On Stella’s say so, sometime down the road, maybe I’ll try the 10^th book, Riders on the Storm.